sid kirchheimer

Having continued for more than a decade, the jury duty scam remains one of the most successful multipurpose intimidation impostor schemes. Fraudsters can not only get a quick payoff but also enough personal details for future identity theft. Usually, the deception is about failing to appear for mandated jury duty, although some targets are told they skipped a court-summoned order to appear as a defendant, are in contempt or have a federal warrant out for their arrest. Ways to save, …

Some food for thought at that Labor Day barbecue: Scammers are increasing their focus on small and midsize businesses. Among the top ploys that burn employers and their labor force: Phishing emails. Business email compromise (BEC) is a fast-growing scheme in which cybercrooks glean names and titles of executives from LinkedIn or corporate websites to spoof internal messages, usually alleged to come from top executives. In the most common ruse — netting scammers over $2 billion in recent years, according …

A new school year means new opportunity for identity thieves to cash in on their prized prey — students. Studies show that children under age 18 are about 50 times more likely than adults to be targeted and victimized for identity theft. Reasons: It’s unlikely that elementary through high school students monitor their credit … or even have it. That clean credit history more easily allows scammers to open fraudulent accounts — credit cards, loans and utility service — with …

On crowdfunding websites such as Kickstarter, GoFundMe, Indiegogo and YouCaring, prayers are answered. Businesses and jobs are created. People get lifesaving medical treatment. Dreams become reality for those seeking help, typically through small donations by many. But fraud is another truth on these websites — part of the unregulated crowdfunding industry that globally raised some $34 billion last year — with post-duped reports on Kickscammed, GoFraudMe and elsewhere that detail broken promises, stolen money and well-meaning donors getting scammed. Ways …

Despite the popular perception — more likely, because of it — those at highest risk of falling for a scam are millennials, not their grandparents or parents. So says the Better Business Bureau (BBB) after polling some 2,000 adults in the U.S. and Canada about perceived personal vulnerability to scams and who they think is most likely to fall victim. (Participants were unaware that the BBB was behind the survey.) The majority of respondents believed that the typical scam victim …

Robocalls aren’t just annoying; increasingly, they are the initial contact that scammers use to get you. With autodialers that can blast millions of prerecorded calls per day, fraudsters simply program sequences of phone numbers — dialing X telephone numbers with Y area codes or prefixes over Z period. Follow the message instructions, or sometimes just say “Hello,” and you’re transferred to a live call center, where the hard sell begins. (Even pushing the keypad to supposedly “opt out of future …